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‘Tis the Season for Book Lists: Reading List for 2013

A couple of years ago I wrote up a reading list for myself. I am notorious for making up book lists and reading plans and then abandoning those lists for whatever strikes my fancy. For the past couple of years my reading has been all over the map, and not at all what I planned on reading.

Here’s the reading list I wrote in 2011 with notes about what I’ve read thus far:

My Reading List

Fiction:

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart[2011]

Richard Adams: Watership Down

Mitch Albom: The Five People You Meet In Heaven [2011]

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Laurie Anderson: Speak

Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters [note: started and abandoned in 2011]

Jorge Borges: Ficciones

Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Albert Camus: The Stranger

Truman Capote: In Cold Blood

Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

Tom Clancy: The Hunt For Red October [2012]

James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans

Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment

Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy

George Eliot: Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

William Faulkner: Absalom! Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night, Babylon Revisited

Margaret Mitchell: Gone With The Wind

Robert Graves: I, Claudius

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Joseph Heller: Catch-22

Earnest Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

Henry James: Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The American

James Joyce: Dubliners

Ken Kesey: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Rudyard Kipling: Kim

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

Sinclair Lewis: Babbit

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love In The Time Of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Toni Morrison: Jazz

Bharati Mukherjee: Tree Bride

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient

Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way

Ayn Rand: Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead

Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children

Louis Sachar: Holes

JD Salinger: Catcher in the Rye

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

John Steinbeck: East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men

Bram Stoker: Dracula [2012]

William Styron: Sophie’s Choice

Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace

Robert Penn Warren: All The King’s Men

Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence, The House Of Mirth

Drama:

Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler

Arthur Miller: The Crucible

Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night

Peter Shaffer: Amadeus

George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion

Neil Simon: The Odd Couple

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie

Poetry:

W.H. Auden

Anne Bradstreet

Robert Browning

Emily Dickinson

John Donne

T.S. Eliot

Robert Frost

Seamus Heaney

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Langston Hughes

Ben Jonson

John Keats

John Milton

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

William Carlos Williams

William Wordsworth

William Butler Yeats

Non-Fiction:

George W. Bush: Decision Points

G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man

Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers [2011], What the Dog Saw

C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man, The Four Loves

George Marsden: Jonathan Edwards

Sarah Palin: Going Rogue

Mark Twain: Autobiography of Mark Twain [note: I started this one in 2012. Part 1 is 972 pages and I’m only 44 pages into 262 pages of introductory material!]

John Piper: Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, Let the Nations Be Glad! Battling Unbelief

Paul Tripp: A Shelter in the Time of Storm [2011]

Planned Reading for 2013

This year, I want to be more strategic and disciplined about what I read, because I, once again, have grand plans for the reading I’ll do this year. I still want to read many of the books on the list I created in 2011, but some excellent books have been published or purchased since that I have added to my ever-growing list.

A few years ago I made the goal of reading one book a week (and I kept it for about two years!), but I’ve kind of slacked off from that pace of reading–and sadly, at times, reading in general. So this year, I am challenging myself again to finish one book a week.

Some of these books are really long (500+ pages) and I always find books throughout the year that I want to read but weren’t planned, so I’ve left myself some wiggle-room.

Fiction:

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Laurie Anderson: Speak

Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov

Rudyard Kipling: Kim, Jungle Book

C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love In The Time Of Cholera

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient

Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children

Louis Sachar: Holes

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace

Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter

Drama:

Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night

George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Non-Fiction:

Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking

Malcolm Gladwell:What the Dog Saw

C.S. Lewis: The Four Loves

George Marsden: Jonathan Edwards

Eric Metaxas: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Tony Reinke: Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books

Christian Living:

Jerry Bridges: Respectable Sins,The Disciplines of Grace

Tim Challies: The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment

Bryan Chapell: Holiness by Grace

Steve DeWitt: Eyes Wide Open

Kevin DeYoung: The Good News We Almost Forgot, The Hole in Our Holiness, What is the Mission of the Church?

Jonathan Dodson: Gospel-Centered Discipleship

D. Martyn Lloyd Jones: Spiritual Depression

Bob Kauflin: Worship Matters

Tim Keller: The Reason for God, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

J.I. Packer: Knowing God

John Piper: Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God, Let the Nations Be Glad!